Application Of Theme-based CBI To College English Teaching In Chinese Higher Vocational-technical Education

As the development of economy in China, workers with specific skills are urgently needed. Higher vocational-technical colleges (HVTC) which are responsible for producing of qualified worker with specific skills have gained unprecedented support from official government. To promote the development of HVTC, the Ministry of Education decided to construct100advanced demonstration higher vocational colleges starting from2006. In the context of globalization, college English course plays an important role in the process of producing qualified worker with specific skills. However, lots of problems exist in the current college English course at HVTC. First of all, many teachers still use traditional methods. They focus on language forms and ignore the content language conveys. Then, teachers are in a centered status. Students receive knowledge passively and interaction is rarely seen in classroom. As a result, many students at HVTC have lost interest of English learning. They learn English only to pass examinations. To change this situation, this paper presents the application of theme-based CBI at HVTC.Content-based Instruction (CBI) developed in the1980s in western countries and was brought to China in the1990s. As a subset of communicative language teaching, it aims at the teaching of communicative competence. In CBI, language form is not the direct learning object. Language and content are integrated and language proficiency is gained in the process of learning content. Theoretical support for CBI ranges from second language acquisition theory to educational psychology. There are different models for CBI. The widely used models at university-level are theme-based model, adjunct model and sheltered model.Through the analysis and comparison of the three models, this paper presents that the theme-based CBI is the best model for college English teaching at HVTC. Adjunct model and sheltered model focus more on learning of content and are usually used in western countries to help those students who have difficulty in language to learn mainstream subjects. It can be used in English for specific purpose (ESP) courses in China. The theme-based CBI has explicit language learning objective. Various interesting themes provide meaningful context for language learning. The themes are not limited to profession topics. Any topic, as long as the students are interested in, could be brought into class for discussion. As a result, language teachers without professional knowledge background can be qualified to apply the theme-based CBI in their teaching. The third chapter in this paper illustrates in detail the challenges of applying theme-based CBI at HVTC, the use of "Six-T’s Approach" to organize course, and the instructional strategies.To check the effect of theme-based CBI, the author conducted an experiment.177students with the same major from two classes were selected as the subjects. Pretest indicated that their English proficiency was at the same level. One was the treatment class, which was taught by the author. The other was the control class, which was taught by another teacher. Both the two classes learned the same subjects—English for science and technology. Theme-based CBI was adopted in the treatment class.Knowledge of science and technology was integrated with language study. Students were encouraged to study actively through accomplishing tasks, group discussion, brainstorming etc. Traditional teaching methods were used in the control class. Language forms such as vocabulary and grammar were learned through text analysis. The teacher was in a centered status and students received knowledge passively. Posttest indicated that the students were still at the same level in terms of English proficiency. It did not mean that theme-based CBI was ineffective, as the result of questionnaire and interview from the treatment class indicated that the theme-based CBI was warmly welcomed by the students. They agreed that their interest of learning English increased to a higher level and language skills, especially spoken English, were improved. In conclusion, theme-based CBI is advised to be used widely to college English teaching at HVTC. However, teachers are required to make much more effort and design the learning process elaborately and supervise the learning process strictly.